


Alive

by toothybeastie



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Backstory, Childhood Memories, Childhood Trauma, Coffee, Forgiveness, Friendship, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Melancholy, Memories, Mild Gore, Near Future, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Wistful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-12
Updated: 2014-04-12
Packaged: 2018-01-19 01:56:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1451134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toothybeastie/pseuds/toothybeastie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha finds Bucky Barnes in New York, the city where he was born, and tries to convince him that forgiveness is worth fighting for. It's something she's been telling herself for years, after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alive

**Author's Note:**

> I liked the thought of these two bonding, but not romantically- more through shared experience.

*****

Natasha found her target in a small pocket park, tucked between the coal-streaked walls of the two buildings on either side of him. Behind her, around her, traffic hummed and pulsed; she could hear the faint echo of horns blaring. They, as usual, even after years of living away from constant near-death experience, left faint shocks of adrenaline tingling through her system. The phantom itch of a gun in her hands made her fingers curl involuntarily on the cardboard cup-carrier she held, but she hid it, as she always did, behind her faint, foxish smile.

                The man in front of her wasn’t so subtle. He sat on a bench, water-stained and stone, and around him waved greenery. Great rhododendrons, covered in the last of their vivid red blooms. Hedges thick enough and high enough to drown out most of the exhaust from the nearby roadway. Trees, their branches interlacing overhead, dappled the grass in shadow and sun. The breeze that wafted down smelt of the cold and the previous night’s rain, a clean, sharp scent- likely as unfamiliar to James Barnes as it was to Natasha.

He looked up as she approached, the heels of her boots clacking on the paved path. He was remarkably well-preserved for what basically amounted to a ninety-whatever-year-old freeze-dried vegetable; Natasha had heard- and seen, and _killed,_ on more than one occasion- the effects of repeat cryostasis, and it wasn’t pretty.  

Barnes _was_ pretty. His blue-grey eyes were red-rimmed and surrounded by bruises, and along his unshaven cheek was a split that looked as if it might have come from a fist to the face, but under that was a kind of large-eyed lostness that hadn’t quite been slaughtered by years of forced killing. By years of electricity applied directly to the brain. By falling into dreams of a past life he couldn’t understand, and cast adrift amidst waves of memory that didn’t piece together, that didn’t fit the mongrel metal thing he was, he had become.

_Lucky bastard,_ Natasha thought, coming to a halt in front of him. _Wish I could keep as much as he did._

“Morning,” Natasha said. She tried a smile, but he didn’t respond- probably because it didn’t feel as if it had reached her eyes. It didn’t matter. She held up the cardboard tray, laden with two coffees in paper cups. Feathers of steam drifted from them and into the air. “Got time?”

His brow creased. “Time?”

“For a chat. I know you do; I look at your schedule. I didn’t know a man could read so much and not have some kind of aneurysm.”

He still didn’t smile. “If you want.”

“No,” Natasha said. “Look, Barnes. I’m not in the city because I like the smell of hot garbage. I have exactly a thousand places I need to be. So this isn’t about what I want. It’s about what you need. So may I sit down, or do you want to push the point a little further past the line?”

For a moment, James Barnes did nothing. Then he looked down at his shoes and shifted sideways, leaving enough room for Natasha to sit.

“Obliged,” she said, and did. Her shoulder brushed his- the human one- and she felt the slight warmth of his skin through her jacket. She offered the coffee. “One’s got sugar. Other cream. I wasn’t sure what you liked.”

“What is it?”

“Coffee,” said Natasha. “Pretty sure you know what that is.”

He took the one with sugar and sipped at it, tentative. He jumped as it sloshed out over his nose, still too hot to drink. It was dark as machine oil against the laboratorial pallor of his skin. Of course- he’d been hiding under hats and night, not wanting to risk being recognized from any passersby during the Triskelion incident, or from the exhibit at the Smithsonian, which just happened to feature a four-foot-tall photo of his face. He hadn’t exactly had time to work up a tan.

“You know,” he said, scrubbing his face clean with the chrome thumb of his cybernetic arm, “One good thing about this arm…I can hold this without getting burnt.”

“Wow,” Natasha said. “I’ll have to get me one.”

Finally, he smiled. It trembled on his face, as if it took effort- but it was definitely a smile. “Don’t,” he said. “Really, don’t.” He held it out, coffee still clenched in its hand. It was a marvel of engineering, of HYDRA’s manipulation of wires and flesh and the complex interlacing of nerves and muscle tissue necessary for it to work. An arm, made up of interlocking sections of gleaming steel, perfect in its every detail. The red star emblazoned on its shoulder was hidden by Barnes’ t-shirt, as was the raw, scarified connection of metal to skin, where the implants still pulled at him. Stark had re-coordinated it so it wouldn’t torque so much pain from him, at Rogers’ insistence, but Natasha knew it still had to be uncomfortable.

She’d heard him in the night. Heard Rogers too, his low voice, calming, slow. _It’s all right, Bucky; I’m here, I’m here._

_-I can see it all-_

_-Please, Bucky, you can’t-_

_-I have to finish- I have to finish my mission- I can see it, I can feel it-_

He seemed to be better in daytime, in a familiar place. Or maybe he was just better at pretending to be better. He’d grown up here, after all, in good old New York City. It was a better birthplace than some- Natasha’s own, the slums of Soviet Moscow, being near the forefront. From what Natasha had read in Barnes’ dossier, he’d been all kinds of happy. Good parents, enough to eat. Natasha’s own early childhood had been marked by scrambling through piles of garbage and the steaming refuse of the wealthy and the poor alike, finding rats and chunks of brick to bludgeon them with, hearing the snap of small bones and the warm gush of blood. Cooking them on oil fires in alleys, furtive glances to make sure no other street children- or worse- were about to spring on her, take her prey. That was before the ballet, and Gnat, and the great white wolf- before her life had been a life, and more than just an existence.

But those were stories for another time.

In the present, she swept her red bangs out of her eyes and took a long drink of her coffee. It was weak and watery compared to the burning strength of the Greek coffee she’d recently become accustomed to, but there was still a certain charm to it that spoke of late nights at the Stark tower, three in the morning, ordering out. There’d been none of that since the Triskelion incident, but Natasha still had her memories.

“You’re probably wondering why I’m here,” Natasha said.

Barnes gave a small start. He’d been watching the trees, the passersby on the sidewalk. “Yeah,” he said. “Yes. I mean.”

“No points for grammar,” Natasha said. “I’ve been laying low. I’m not supposed to be here, strict.” She pointed to the clump of tourists taking pictures across the street. “One of them could be a HYDRA agent. Could tell their superiors where I am. Where you are. You’re being a little ostentatious, Barnes.”

He folded his metal arm closer to his side. “Anyone sees me, I can kill them.”

“Like I said. Ostentatious.” Natasha couldn’t stand her coffee any longer, and tossed the cup into the nearest trash can. It sailed straight in without even clattering. “You used to live in the shadows. A hunting-hound. They sent you out for the birds and boar and kenneled you when you were done. It didn’t matter who saw you, who recognized you- you’d vanish without a trace a moment later. But this is a new world, and you’re a new man. Clean and shiny, polished bright. There aren’t any more shadows for you to hide in. That’s what going clean means. Standing outside at high noon, letting your choices sparkle in the sun.”

“You know about it,” Barnes said. It was a statement, not a question.

“You think I got this good without playing the game?” Natasha told him. “Believe me, Barnes. I’ve seen enough people die to recognize it in front of me.”

“I’m not dying,” Barnes said. His voice dropped low, hoarse. “I’m…I’m fine…I’m all right.”

“Toughest kill?” Natasha said.

“1978. Lady Margaret Wright,” Barnes said, automatically. “She was in a submarine. Underwater. Surrounded by three feet of reinforced bulletproof steel. And…sea mines. Her guards were well-trained. I killed her by shooting a pill of compressed cyanide into her water supply as it was brought onboard the sub in Reykjavik. She died quickly, though I didn’t see it.”

“Worst mistake?”

“I don’t make mistakes.”

“Of course you don’t. Easiest kill?”

“American general. 1982. My bullet caught him in the temple and he fell over a railing. He was dead before he hit, though the fall would have done it just as well.”

“Happiest memory?”

“I-” He stopped, his mouth slightly open. “I…don’t…”

“Happiest memory,” Natasha repeated.

His eyes slid past Natasha, fixing on a point just over her shoulder. They were still enough that Natasha could see the lattice of tree branches reflected in them, like veins. “During the war,” he murmured. “We were…together. All of us. Alive. I was alive…”

His voice trailed away.

“It gets easier,” Natasha said.

“It doesn’t feel easier,” Barnes said.

“Nothing good is easy,” said Natasha. “Not at the beginning.” She got up and brushed off her skirt. “I have to go. Plane to catch. You know, if you’re ever feeling lonely, there’s a man I can think of who’d sure like to see you.”

“Please- don’t tell him where I am.”

“As if I’d sell secrets like that,” Natasha said. She tilted her head to the side, surveying him from this new angle. The breeze stirred his ragged, dark hair; he clutched his coffee cup like a life preserver. Again, it hit her- that shock of innocence, the boyish cast of his face, under the drawn weariness. He was there somewhere, that good soldier, that good man.

He’d rebuild.  

If only she was so sure about herself.

_Still,_ Natasha thought, _it’s good to have a little conviction in this world of ours._

“Hey,” she said. “Bucky.”

His eyes widened, almost imperceptibly.

“Be careful,” she told him.

“After you,” he said, and for the first time in a long while, Natasha’s smile felt real.

 


End file.
